Feeling the ‘Burn’: thriller author Peter Heller appears at United Theatre Monday

August 16, 2024 6:28 pm • Last Updated: August 16, 2024 6:28 pm

By Rick Koster
Day Arts/Features writer

Peter Heller (John Burcham)

Peter Heller’s novels are wildly popular with a wide demographic of readers. This translates to bestseller lists as well as prestigious awards and esteemed year-end best-of surveys. So it’s no surprise the publicists at his publishing house, Knopf, call him “The Profit.”

Except … it’s “The PROPHET.”

Y’see, Heller writes hooky, quasi-dystopian suspense with a strong literary element that describes our gorgeous natural world spinning out of balance at the hands of men — and frequently Heller’s plots have a disturbing way of anticipating the near future.

His breakout debut, “The Dog Stars,” which recently placed #6 on a Forbes Magazine list of the 30 greatest dystopian novels, was about a man and his dog searching for civilization after a devastating pandemic. It came out a few years before COVID. More recently, “The River” anticipated the eruptions of massive wildfires in commonplace fashion across the west.

And now Heller’s latest novel is out. It’s called “Burn” and it’s about lifelong best friends Jess and Storey. Approaching middle age, they emerge from the woods of northern Maine after an off-the-grid hunting trip — and learn to their slowly dawning horror that the state seems, under sway of an anarchic paramilitary force, to have seceded from the union in scorch-the-earth fashion.

Given the rise in extreme anti-government factions simmering across the country in the wake of the Jan. 6 rebellion, “Burn” certainly seems resonant.

“I guess sometimes it does seem like I’m prescient. People will say, ‘I wish you’d stop doing that,’” Heller laughed. He was on the phone earlier this week, racing from his home in Denver to the airport to begin a tour in support of “Burn,” which stops Monday at the United Theatre in Westerly.

He adds, “The truth is, all I’m doing is looking around and taking in what’s happening around me. I just really hope ‘Burn’ isn’t quite as accurately foretelling.”

Something’s really wrong in the state of Maine

However, it IS fiction, and the intriguing set up in “Burn” is heightened because, in addition to the ominous danger and unknown foes Jess and Storey are facing, they also have lives “back home.” Storey, a professor, has a wife and children in Vermont, and Jess, reeling from the death of his dog and a painful separation from his wife in Colorado, needs to recalibrate and decide on a course of action. But every cautious move they make only seems to reveal more violence and death with entire communities extinguished.

When they finally manage to catch a snatch of a radio broadcast out of Canada, their worst fears are not only realized but expanded with nationwide implications and an assassination. That’s when they discover a little girl hiding in the storage locker of an abandoned boat.

It’s true “Burn” is coming out well after Jan. 6, and it’s certainly not the first film or book about paramilitary or revolutionary forces seizing control. But the mood of the country since he first started working on the book concerns him.

“The thing is,” Heller said, “publishing a novel maybe takes longer than some people realize. After you write it, the manuscript still has to go through edits and revisions and typesetting and so on, and it can be a two- or three-year process.

“Before that and up to now, things are escalating very quickly in our country. When I turned the manuscript in, I thought, you know, by the time ‘Burn’ is published, (secession or heightened paramilitary violence) could be escalating in scary fashion. It’s getting crazy.”

It’s fun to write darkness

For all this doom and gloom, let it be known that Heller had a blast writing “Burn.” Much of that is because of his writing process. He doesn’t plot; he doesn’t have any preconceived themes; he doesn’t have a group of characters; and he damned sure doesn’t know how any given book is going to end. As a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he focused on poetry, Heller loves the idea of sitting down at a keyboard and … just taking off.

Part of this is his adventurer’s spirit — not to mention his resume. Novels are a bit of a late-breaking activity for Heller. He’s a longtime adventure writer with four nonfiction titles and a former contributing editor at Outside Magazine, Men’s Journal and National Geographic Adventure. He prefers the outdoors and has traveled the world as an expedition kayaker with whitewater descents in the Pamirs, the Tien Shan mountains, the Caucuses, Central America and Peru. Heller was also the first man, with a Kiwi paddler named Roy Bailey, to kayak the Muk Su River in the High Pamirs of Tajikistan.

A constant theme running through Heller’s work is that love of nature, and his concern for the planet. There’s a perhaps spiritual element to this aspect of his writing that tempers the darkness.

“I guess I’m a pantheist,” Heller said in an email subsequent to the original conversation. “There’s a whole host of writers who had a big impression on me and whose words and cadences I often hear when I’m writing my own work. Those include Thoreau and Steinbeck, and often (specific) lines of writers I’ve loved and admired — Conrad, Faulkner, Eudora Welty and pets like Yeats, Eliot and Emily Dickinson — repeat in my mind like the chorus of songs.”

With all this spinning through his mind, Heller seems pleasantly surprised that he’s able to just take off with no ideas or concept — and write a book.

“Believe it or not, most of the stories come out working,” he laughed. “Often I have to go back and adjust stuff for continuity and chronology. My editor might say, ‘So and so needs to be in the woods five days, not four, or it doesn’t work.’ So I’ll fix it.

“But generally I get rolling and pretty quickly get the general idea of what’s going on and what might happen. In ‘Burn,’ I had these guys standing by a lake, looking at this burned out town and wondering why there were no bodies. And I didn’t have any better idea than they did! Was it aliens? They were in northern Maine. Could our polite Canadian neighbors suddenly not so polite? I had no idea.”

The story’s over

Clearly, given the success of his novels — in addition to “Dog Star” and the River,” “The Last Guide,” “The Ranger,” “The Orchard,” “Celine” and “The Painter” — Heller’s method works. Still, a question is put to him: How does he know when to END a novel?

“That’s interesting,” Heller said. “I guess it’s true that I often want to stay with my characters for a while. With ‘Dog Star,’ my first novel, I enjoyed my characters and the process so much my inclination was to keep going, just so I wouldn’t miss them.

“And in ‘Burn,’ I really like my three protagonists; I came to know them so well and they’re in my heart like people I know and love, and I dearly want them to be safe and to have the things they deserve in life like food and security and joy. At the same time, by now, I somehow always know the end is coming, and I respect that and never second guess when it’s time to type ‘The End.’”

Another intriguing aspect of Heller’s books is a very distinctive style. When he’s detailing conversation or action or characters, he writes in very spare, terse fashion. There’s a quick rhythm that propels the reader along. But when he’s describing nature — and, again, the natural world is always a big component in his stories — the change of pace shifts dramatically and writing becomes lush, beautiful and sensorially embracing. It’s like watching world class sprinters in a 100 meter race, then changing the channel to a baseball game. Both are fascinating and precisely engineered to maximize the respective tension and pacing for maximum dramatic effect.

Heller is asked if it’s hard to switch gears in that fashion.

“You know what? I’ve never been asked that,” he said. “It’s completely unconscious. I’m just writing along, completely invested in my characters and riding the current of my language. I grew up in a houseful of storytellers. A lot of stories around campfires. I must have internalized a lot of that.

“I guess that, as the action speeds up, the delivery gets shorter, and if one of the characters is immersed in the beauty of a scene, I guess it natural to stretch out. There are millions of ways to write stories. However it happens, I definitely have fun doing it.”